ectoplasm ovenbird Erasure happens slowly. It doesn’t even hurt. One day you will wake to find that you’re invisible. You’ve been looking so hard at the world that you forgot to see yourself and no one else picked up the slack, so you fade. My mom was the family archivist. She was always insisting on taking pictures. If I was going somewhere even remotely momentous she would haul me out to the back deck to take pictures in front of the ivy covered trellis. It made a pleasing backdrop and the light there was always even. She did the work of documenting my childhood for me—printing the pictures, putting them in albums, writing the names of all my friends next to their photographs. She was pulling together a story made of all the moments that mattered so I would have a record and I didn’t realize what an overwhelming task that was until I had children of my own. Now I take the pictures. As my son runs off with his friends to their high school orientation I stop them and take a picture, embarassing the hell out of my son in the process. I say, “You’re going to want this memory when you’re older!” but they don’t believe me. No one takes my picture now. My mother is far away and there is no one in my life who looks at me and says, “you’re going to want to remember this” and thinks to freeze the moment. I exist mostly in badly framed selfies where I’m trying desperately to get myself and my kids in the same frame. When my children look at the pictures from their childhood it will be like I wasn’t even there. Motherhood is like that. You become background noise in the lives of others, an occasionally humiliating presence, steadfast and oozing love like a ghost, dripping the ectoplasm of everything you once were onto the ground in putrid chunks while the living walk into their futures, never seeing you, eyes closed to the horror. 250829 what's it to you? who go blather from